I find that less so now, but only a few years ago, I was asked with regularity and sincerity, “What does climate have to do with my faith?” In the early years I would answer, quite timidly, “Everything.” But now with force and emphasis, I proclaim, “Everything!”

Once I understood the serious problem that burning fossil fuels was causing in the atmosphere, and the urgent need to curtail these harmful gases from continuing to pollute our air and warm the global climate, I had to ask myself, what effect is this having on the community of life that God called “good”? And what would be the proper response from the faith community? Not only did I became an advocate for changing the way we think about and use energy, I began to see this as an important moral issue. Probably the most important moral issue of our time.

If one professes a love for God, which Muslims, Jews and Christians do, you cannot insult God by destroying the creation that God loves. If you are a Buddhist who understands the interconnectedness of all things and all life, then you cannot harm any part of it because doing so harms the whole. Hindus have a similar belief. In fact, every religion has a mandate to be stewards of the natural resources that God provided for our use, not our abuse. We were put here to be the caretakers of the God’s Earth. That is what I believe is the human purpose: love one another and to preserve forever this fragile planet that has been given to us in trust.

When it comes to climate change, many of us in the religious community see the need for a values message and we recognize the important role that religion has. The values of a society can be influenced by religious voices speaking out from a moral high ground. Preaching about climate protection from the pulpit will likely have more influence than a scientist and certainly more than one of today’s politicians.

Global climate change has happened in the past but never as fast as since the industrial revolution two hundred years ago. The unprecedented content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has formed a blanket-like cover over the earth, which traps the warm air from being released. It’s referred to as the “greenhouse gas effect.” Scientists have proven that humans are contributing to this phenomenon through being overly dependent on burning fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil for energy. An unstable climate will affect every aspect of life on the planet. It will effect crop disruption resulting in food shortages, droughts resulting in water shortages, floods resulting in destruction of homes and habitat, extended length of heat waves and lives lost as a result, increased forest fires and severe air pollution. It’s the most vulnerable among us that are already suffering from these climate related incidents and that’s precisely why the faith community has to move into action, in service to the underserved and speaking out for the ones who cannot speak for themselves. We need to fight for justice and that’s what all religions teach.

If wealthy nations have contributed to a condition that is depriving the world’s most vulnerable of their basic needs for health and stability, don’t we have a moral responsibility to help out? It isn’t just a responsibility for religious people, it is a mandate from God, an obligation. Loving our neighbor means we don’t pollute their air or water. It means that we need to be aware of how our behavior affects our neighbors and the generations that come after us.

Perhaps the time has come for us to re-identify the human purpose. Why did God put us here in the first place? I think the human purpose is to love and live in harmony with each other, and to find sustainable ways of living together without destroying the very resources that God provided for us in order to stay healthy and be safe.

If we continue on the path we are on without addressing the destruction that humans are causing on the planet, we will not survive into the next century, nor can we expect life to look anything like it does today. We are standing on the edge of two worlds: the one that God created and the one that humans are making. The one we are making is not sustainable. In 2010, many parts of the world have experienced extreme weather conditions that are more severe than ever before. The climate scientists predicted that this would happen and these disasters would occur thirty years ago. We haven’t listened to them in the way that we should have. I recall that we didn’t listen to Jeremiah, Isaiah or Amos either and thus we are dealing with war, poverty, and big gaps between the rich and poor, between educated and non-educated, between the have and have-nots. Why? It’s because we didn’t listen, we didn’t want to change our ways. The modern day prophets are the climate scientists who are once again asking us to change our ways. We have the technology to get off fossil fuels for energy, but we don’t seem to have the political will or the moral integrity to do it. Or do we?

The good news is that more and more people are coming to see the climate as a crisis and a moral issue and an urgent one. Both political parties have leaders who understand the seriousness of this problem. What we are lacking is the social movement to rise up from the people. This is the role of the religious community. We need to educate and motivate the moral imaginations of people in the pews. We did this to help end slavery, to educate women and children and, most recently, the civil rights movement. The religious community has the responsibility to move people again into understanding a shared purpose for being alive on the planet. Our shared purpose to serve and love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Congregations all over the country are serving as examples to their communities and the social movement that needs to happen has begun.

Conversation with Sally Bingham

Daniel Pawlus: The video we just saw is from the documentary “Preaching the Planet,” a production of The Regeneration Project and Kris Films in San Francisco, which features Sally Bingham; Senior Dharma Teacher Linda Cutts; the Rev. Stephen Privett; Rabbi Melanie Aron; and Imam M. A. Azeer. For more information, you can visit our web site at 30goodminutes.org.

If you’d like a printed transcript, CD or DVD of the message you just heard from Sally Bingham, we’ll tell you how to place an order at the end of the program. Or you can visit our website to watch the video again or read the text anytime.

Now, let’s talk with Sally Bingham. Sally, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m excited to have you here to talk about this very important issue. You’ve been at this a long time.

Sally Bingham: I have.

Pawlus: I’m just curious. What was the epiphany, the initial inspiration that really opened your eyes to do this work?

Bingham: Daniel, I’d have to do another twenty minutes to give you the big, long story. It’s because I was a trustee for a big national environmental organization called Environmental Defense Fund and I was hearing from scientists and economists what humans were doing to the planet. But I never heard from the pulpit anything about saving Creation. No religious leader. I’ve been an Episcopalian all my life. I’ve been attending church since I was a child—before I was a child even—and never heard anybody talk about protecting Creation, even though we pray for a reverence for the Earth. We ask God to help us have the courage to use resources rightly without harming anyone else. And yet no one was talking about this. So twenty years ago I started asking clergy why do we never hear about this.

Lillian Daniel: Were you already a clergy person at that time?

Bingham: I was not. There was this very definite vacuum and the religious community had abdicated its responsibility, at least as far as I thought.

Daniel: So did you go to seminary aware that you wanted to be a priest who was going to be an activist in the environmental movement or did that unfold as a surprise?

Bingham: Well, I didn’t go to seminary thinking I would be a priest at all. I went to seminary looking for where was the disconnect between what we say we believe in and how we behave. During that process, during my middle year when everyone goes off and has to do a field education, I didn’t even go to a church and become seminarian because I never though I would be behind an altar or in a pulpit. So I started the Commission for the Environment for the Diocese of California with the permission and blessing of our bishop. It was those people sitting around my dining room table every Tuesday afternoon saying you ought to be ordained. I resisted and resisted. It’s one of those situations where I felt like Mary. Was I going to say yes to God or not? Eventually I was persuaded that if no one else was going to be in the pulpit talking about saving Creation then maybe this was my calling and that it was real and I needed to do it. However, nobody has been ordained to do an environmental ministry in the Episcopal Church prior to my doing this. Therefore, it was a ten-year process. I was a seminarian in a church after we went through all of this.

Maybe it was a real call to ordination but I worked in a congregation where they said don’t ever mention the word ecology. I did baptisms and assisted at weddings and funerals and I did all the things that the priest didn’t want to do and had me doing for three full years. Then came the process of school and all those things. Eventually having gone to college, seminary, three years in a parish to prove that this was real, ten years later, in 1997, I was ordained as an Episcopal priest. Of course, now all I do is talk about religion and the environment. I go all over the country to different churches and different denominations.

Pawlus: Let’s talk about that a little bit more. I think we misquoted you earlier in the program. There are actually 10,000 congregations involved in this movement right now.

Bingham: There are.

Pawlus: It’s incredibly interesting to me. I loved the book on the multi-faith perspective: love God, heal Earth. It’s clearly a multi-faith issue that people are dealing with. What is your sense of how we’re doing on this?  Because it feels like—and Lillian and I talked a little bit about this before hand—well, of course, we should be doing something but are we doing enough? Is the movement finding the right language and is it making the progress it needs to make with the urgency it needs to make it?

Bingham: I don’t think I could ever say we’re doing enough. We can always do more. But we have made tremendous progress just in the last ten years and you can tell from the book. We have Buddhists and Muslims and Catholics and Evangelicals, Jewish people, Bahá’is. Most mainstream religions have some kind of a mandate on climate change; not just on environmental stewardship, but on climate change now. The movement is beginning. I believe now that the religious voice involved in this dialogue is going to make the change happen, that needs to happen. Environmental organizations have been working on this for thirty years. If you think back to when we tried to ask people to stop smoking and doctors and scientists said smoking will hurt you, it was twenty years before people actually stopped smoking. However, it happened almost overnight as soon as enough people understood it. And I think that’s what we’re approaching is a multitude of people who are beginning to understand the climate problem is real and it’s urgent and it’s serious. Once that moral voice steps in and says it’s immoral to be destroying the livelihood and stability of poor people, not only in the United States, but all around the world.

Daniel: I have a question for you about what gives you perhaps the heart for this or the passion for it. Many of us experience the Divine when we’re in creation. But what for you is that place where you feel most connected to the Divine? What is that natural place?

Bingham: Well, it is just as you say. I grew up in the country. I have a very, very strong sense of the Divine in nature. I think you’ll find when you’re talking to folks that most people who go out into nature have a strong sense of God there. If you ask some of the folks that we work with why are you doing this work, it’s because of when they are in nature they’re connected to God and that feeling that God is really present. I believe that the world is a manifestation of God.

Daniel: Thank you for reminding us of that.